...Over the past 20 years, I’d spent between 2 and 6 weeks studying candidates and ballot measures to be as informed as possible. This election cycle, I was finished in hours. On this day, I stand before you to say that I did my part to hand the Legislative branch of the American government to the Republicans. Not that one vote matters in the grand scheme of things, but every traditionally Democratic vote that goes Republican is a two vote swing. So the Republicans own the Senate, but not with a “super majority” to completely dictate terms legislatively.

From my new perspective after Tuesday, it’s one down and three to go: Super majority in the Senate, the Presidency, and one Supreme Court justice. I’m disgusted for writing that last sentence....

There are roughly 730 days until Election Day 2016. The media that drove me away from my political leanings is going to need every one of those days to convince me that bashing gamers from August 28th until Tuesday was just a misunderstanding. They will need every one of those days to convince me that my input into the liberal ideology is valued regardless of my hobbies, support for GamerGate, or my gender. The alternative is to hand both the Legislative and Executive branch of the US Government over to Republicans, and as I found out on Tuesday, it is well within my capability to do so.

Tick tock. Tick tock.

Yep it was about #GamerGate I got assaulted in part because after their "research" they determined I was an "internet misogynist."

In recent days, the past comments of Gruber -- who in a 2010 speech noted that he "helped write the federal bill" and "was a paid consultant to the Obama administration to help develop the technical details as well" -- have been given renewed attention.

CADILLAC TAX" WILL INCREASE TO 40% FOR EMPLOYERS...which will cause companies to get rid of employee insurance programs. The LIES inflicted on STUPID American people are endless, and oh so damaging to families. It will be up to the Supreme Court and Congress to end this nightmare on America.

...starting in 2018, companies that provide health insurance that costs more than $10,200 for an individual or $27,500 for a family will have to pay a 40 percent tax.

...Now, it’s not unconstitutional to lie. Nor are laws enacted by means of deliberate deception thereby rendered invalid. But it is helpful for citizens to know the cynicism with which the massive federalization of their health care was crafted.

It gets even worse, thanks again to Gruber. Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case claiming that the administration is violating its own health-care law, which clearly specifies that subsidies can be given only to insurance purchased on “exchanges established by the state.” Just 13 states have set up such exchanges. Yet the administration is giving tax credits to plans bought on the federal exchange — serving 37 states — despite what the law says.

If the plaintiffs prevail, the subsidy system collapses and, with it, Obamacare itself. Which is why the administration is frantically arguing that “exchanges established by the state” is merely sloppy drafting, a kind of legislative typo. And that the intent all along was to subsidize all plans on all exchanges....

Re-enter Professor Gruber. On a separate video in a different speech, he explains what Obamacare intended: “If you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.” The legislative idea was to coerce states into setting up their own exchanges by otherwise denying their citizens subsidies.

This may have been a stupid idea, but it was no slip. And it’s the law, as written, as enacted and as intended. It can be changed by Congress only, not by the executive. Which is precisely what the plaintiffs are saying. Q.E.D.

How can you be certain the discovery of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber’s repeated praise for the deception which resulted in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and his acknowledgement of the “stupidity” of the American people to whom he and his Democratic allies successfully lied, is a major development? The media’s response to this revelation.

The videos, none of which were uncovered by any major news organization but by a previously anonymous investment advisor who found them hiding in plain sight on YouTube, feature Gruber denigrating the public his law purports to help. Yet, this has hardly merited a mention on the major networks. No nightly newscast has played the footage, and CBS News This Morning was the first network newscast to feature Gruber’s comments at all – and only just today.

Those in the center-left press who have deigned to debase themselves by addressing a story of interest to conservatives insist that there is nothing much to see here. Not only was Gruber’s admission that the ACA was designed to hide its true costs and impact on the American economy already widely known, they say, but that the American public is generally to blame for Gruber’s mendacity....

“Jonathan Gruber was right,” The New York Times writer and MSNBC contributor Josh Barro insisted. “Public opinion on health care policy is just completely incoherent.” He later insisted that the public’s confusion “puts politicians in a position where the only thing they can do to make the public happy is lie and so, people lied.”

During her Fox Business Network (FBN) show on Friday afternoon, Melissa Francis told viewers that she “was silenced” by executives at CNBC when worked there after she criticized ObamaCare on-air and told viewers that the “math of ObamaCare simply didn’t work.” Speaking in regards to what ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber said about relying on the “stupidity” of voter and the need for lying to get the law passed, Francis opined that while: “It is shocking, but it actually doesn’t surprise me because when I was at CNBC, I pointed out to my viewers that the math of ObamaCare simply didn’t work. Not the politics by the way, just the basic math and when I did that, I was silenced.”

Francis then immediately expanded on her story and held nothing back, including being called into speak with CNBC management:

I said on the air that you couldn’t add millions of people to the system and force insurance companies to cover their preexisting conditions without raising the price on everyone else. I pointed out that it couldn’t possible be true that if you liked your plan, you can keep it. That was a lie, and in fact, millions of people had their insurance cancelled. As a result of what I said at CNBC, I was called into management where I was told that I was “disrespecting the office of the President” by telling what turned out to be the absolute truth.

Turning her attention to her current employer, she pleaded with viewers that FBN and its parent network, the Fox News Channel (FNC), were the only media outlets that are not deceiving the American people:

This, Fox Business, is the only network – and Fox News not complicit in the campaign to keep you in the dark. Don’t trust the other guys. I can tell you firsthand, they are willing participants in the campaign to keep the economic truth from you. Don’t let them do it.

If you rely on ABC or NBC for your news . . . well, in that case you've got all kinds of problems. One of which is that you don't even know about this guy (Gruber) or the things he's admitted about ObamaCare.

It’s a map of the United States showing the congressional districts won by Republicans in red and those won by Democrats in blue.

It looks almost entirely red, except for some pinpoints of blue in major metropolitan areas and a few blue blotches here and there — in Minnesota, northern New Mexico and Arizona, western New England, along the Pacific Coast.

Of course it’s misleading. Congressional districts are of basically equal population, and Democrats tend to roll up big margins in densely populated areas. So while voters have elected at least 244 Republican congressmen and probably will end up with at least 247 — more than in any election since 1928 — the map overstates their dominance.

But it does tell us something about the geographic and cultural isolation of the core groups of the Democratic Party...

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel admitted on Friday that three U.S. nuclear missile bases in North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana were so badly managed that they had to share a wrench used to tighten warheads to the business end of Minuteman 3 missiles.

'How did they do it? They did it by federal expressing the one wrench around to each base,' Hagel told reporters Friday morning during a press conference called to introduce new system-wide reforms affecting the nation's entire intercontinental ballistic missile arsenal.

'They were creative and innovative and they made it work. But that is not the way to do it. We now have a wrench for each location. We're going to have two for each location soon.'

ObamaCare is a failure. For anyone who thinks this is a misprint because no Democratic activist would make such a comment, let me add that it is too big, too complicated and too expensive. Without a public option within its network of exchanges, ObamaCare is a giant blank check to the insurance companies that pushed it through Congress. It punishes responsible consumers like me and treats younger individuals as fools who are expected to pay the bills while not paying attention.

Now we learn in videos that came to light this week that Jonathan Gruber, MIT economist and a key architect of the Affordable Care Act, proudly relied on his perceived “stupidity of the American voter” as the basis for designing ObamaCare. Such comments, along with the program’s notoriously dysfunctional website and false assurances that people can keep their previous health plans, are insults to every citizen regardless of party....

We say that we are the party of the people, but “the people” too often become a singular, monolithic concept for us. We speak for the people, don’t you know, because we can decide what is best for them so they really don’t need to speak for themselves.

The people decided otherwise on Election Day. I hope my party is listening. When the next Congress convenes in 2015, Democrats need to work with the new Republican majority, repeal ObamaCare, override a presidential veto if necessary, and start from scratch on health-care reform.

__________________

Mr. Beu, a nonprofit professional and former hospital insurance coordinator, currently works as a counselor at a social-services agency in Denver.

The map resembles the planet Earth, where most of us reside. The continents are in the right places, and so are the oceans. But we know that’s not the Earth. The risks illustrated are based on climate models, and we know that climate models used by the IPCC for their reports are not based on Earth’s actual climate, as it has existed in the past, or as it exists now. The maps output by climate models may resemble our Earth, but they’re fantasy maps of a fantasy world. They create nothing more than an illusion…an illusion that is intended to make it look like bad things will happen in the future if we all do not agree to reduce our carbon footprints.

We need a name for the imaginary planet simulated by climate models—a planet that looks like Earth, but is not Earth. I’ll propose the climate-modeled planet be called TurnsToCrap. No matter how the modelers present the product of their endeavors, they show the planet TurnsToCrap.... KEEP READING, Watts Up With That? comments section is always a treat.

You can help residents of Weed, California rebuild part of their community after this summer's devastating wildfire.
People can drop off book donations for the Weed library through this Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. inside KTVN's main lobby located at 4925 Energy Way in Reno (89502.)

The Sparks Republican Women club is requesting young adult fiction, and children's books. DVDs and audiobooks are also needed.
The National Federation of Republican Women's Literary and Caring for America Committees adopted the town to help residents with the healing process.

Aside from the nearly $18 trillion national debt, many state governments are looking at future budgets that are trillions of dollars in the red. And they've hidden the numbers by dramatically under-reporting that debt, according to a new report by the think tank State Budget Solutions.

The group looked at what are known as "unfunded liabilities" -- or debt states will owe down the road. It found a number of states are fudging their numbers -- big-time -- using tricks like assuming their stock investments will soar.

The book-cooking could mean bad news for public pensions and other programs that rely on these budgets. The report finds that, nationwide, states have unfunded liabilities of nearly $5 trillion, or $15,000 per American (even though the states allegedly low-ball that number at $2.7 trillion).

“They’re making promises that they can’t keep,” Joe Luppino-Esposito of State Budget Solutions told FoxNews.com.

The arrogance and condescension that has too often characterized the Obama administration’s policies have put the American public in the unfortunate position of having to learn about the health care changes the hard way, on their own.

Here are three crucial changes that the president clearly didn’t want you to know about:

1. HUGE DEFICITS AND NEW TAXES.
2. BUREAUCRACY.
3. STILL MORE BUREAUCRACY.

Here are three new things coming up in 2015 that you aren’t going to like:

After being delayed for a year, large businesses (100 or more employees in 2015, 50 or more in 2016) will be required to offer affordable (and subsidized) health plans to at least 70 percent of their full time employees or face a $2,000-$3,000 penalty per employee.

This mandate will lead to fewer full time employees being hired.

The latest Kaiser Family Foundation poll in July revealed that 53 percent of those surveyed had an unfavorable view of ObamaCare.

“Barack Obama’s not a stupid man, okay?” Gruber said in his remarks at the College of the Holy Cross on March 11, 2010. “He knew when he was running for president that quite frankly the American public doesn’t actually care that much about the uninsured….What the American public cares about is costs. And that’s why even though the bill that they made is 90% health insurance coverage and 10% about cost control, all you ever hear people talk about is cost control. How it’s going to lower the cost of health care, that’s all they talk about. Why? Because that’s what people want to hear about because a majority of American care about health care costs.” …

Thursday, November 13, 2014

The MIT economist who is the brains behind Obamacare has made quite a stir with his admission that President Obama’s health care takeover was built on lies. Mr. Gruber says he was willing to say and do whatever it took to advance the scheme, and now it’s clear why. Obamacare made Mr. Gruber a multimillionaire, and at the expense of the taxpayers.

Video of Mr. Gruber’s remarks, delivered at a University of Pennsylvania health care conference last year, has surfaced in which he explained how the details of Obamacare were kept under wraps until the measure was rammed through the Democratic Congress with no opportunity for anyone to read the legislation. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Mr. Gruber said. “Call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever. But basically, that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass."

Those “stupid” people have been extremely generous to Mr. Gruber. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2010 investigated the $297,600 that the Department of Health and Human Services paid Mr. Gruber to sing the praises of the health care scheme. Congress — or part of Congress — was concerned that this payoff violated a federal law against paid government propaganda, but the GAO said it wasn’t a violation because Mr. Gruber had written his propaganda on his own time. Officially, he was paid only to “analyze various health care reform proposals and identify cost and coverage implications.”

The story begins in Massachusetts where Gruber helped create the state’s universal health law, now known as Romneycare.

“We had a pretty powerful senator you may have heard of named Ted Kennedy,” Gruber said during an event at Simmons College in February. ”Ted Kennedy had managed to figure out a way to rip off the federal Medicaid program to the tune of about $500 million a year through a series of strange manipulations.

“If it made explicit that healthy people would pay and sick people would get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage, and basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

“Yeah there’s things I wish I could change, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

An African American lawmaker — a Democrat — is charging the Ohio Democratic Party and chairman Chris Redfern with racism and defamation in a lawsuit filed this week, telling reporters there is a “plantation mentality” in the party that treats black lawmakers as a monolithic voting bloc.

Last week, Chris Redfern, head of the Ohio Democratic Party, resigned in disgrace after presiding over sweeping losses of every statewide office, a record-breaking majority of Republicans elected to the Ohio legislature, and the utter collapse of the Democrats’ candidate for governor. Redfern also lost his own seat in the Ohio House on Tuesday. As it turns out, all of that may have only been the tip of the iceberg of the Ohio Democratic Party’s problems.

There were plenty of contenders for Biggest Loser, Election Night Edition, on Tuesday, but no one had a worse night than Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern, who has led the state party since 2005. Redfern presided over not only a sweeping loss of every statewide office, but also the epic failure of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ed FitzGerald’s campaign, which made Politico’s list of the Worst Campaigns of 2014. This was the second statewide election in a row that Republicans cleaned Redfern’s clock. To make matters worse for Democrats, Republicans picked up an additional five Ohio House seats, giving them the largest majority held by either party since the number of districts was reduced in 1967.

This is a naked power grab by conservative justices who two years ago just missed killing the Affordable Care Act in its cradle, before it fully took effect.

Naked power grab? It's a naked power grab to grant review of a case that's been decided by a Court of Appeals panel, just because there's no split in the circuits? The Supreme Court has discretion over whether to grant certiorari, and its own rule on "Considerations Governing Review on Writ of Certiorari" refers to "compelling reasons," then lists a few things that it says are "neither controlling nor fully measuring the Court's discretion" but that "indicate the character of the reasons the Court considers." One of the things on the list is a split in what different courts have said about federal law. But another is: "a United States court of appeals has decided an important question of federal law that has not been, but should be, settled by this Court." So: It's an important question. Where's the power grab — naked or clothed?

A leading liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., has begun enlisting its associates in an “all-hands-on-deck effort to support” the Obama administration as it seeks to ink a nuclear deal with Iran by the end of the month, according to emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

...“Our community absolutely must step up and not cede the public narrative to neocon hawks that would send our country to war just to screw the president,” Graham F. West, Truman’s writing and communications associate, wrote in a recent email to the organization’s listserv.

The statement comes from an organization that has long billed itself as an independent voice for “strong, smart, and principled solutions to the global challenges Americans now face,” according to Truman’s mission statement....

One senior foreign policy hand at a D.C.-based organization called Truman’s email “reckless.”

“It’s reckless but not surprising,” said the source, who would only discuss the email on background. “The Truman Institute long ago stopped being a real policy shop and instead became a PR machine for the Obama administration’s foreign policy. The White House will take a deal no matter what, so the Truman Institute is pushing a deal no matter what.”

Gruber dismissed the controversy as arising from a “typo” in the law and his own statement as a “speako.”

Gruber was already on record as being dismissive of lies about the law to help it pass. In an interview last November on MSNBC, after a clip played of President Obama’s infamous proclamation that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” Gruber said that while Obama’s promise was not “technically true” for every American, “I don’t think it matters.”

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly unveiled a second video showing Jonathan Gruber admitting that budgetary tricks were used to deceive Americans about the true cost of Obamacare. It is also the second video in which he calls the American public “stupid.”

While describing some of the language choices made in the law Gruber said they were made “because Americans are too stupid to know the difference.”

Apparently, Gruber’s second swipe at American voters came during a speech he gave some time last year. He is seen explaining how Democrats “played with the language of the Obamacare law.” He is then seen explaining how Obamacare passed, saying “the American voters are too stupid the understand the difference” in the law’s language.

Several midterm election exit polls showed that over half the country still wants to see Obamacare repealed. Gruber’s insults come on the hill of the Supreme Court’s announcement that it will hear arguments on a new lawsuit that aims to invalidate the federal subsidies that make Obamacare viable.

You’ve got to hand it to MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. The guy dubbed the “Obamacare architect” is a viral YouTube sensation. A few months back, he was caught on tape admitting that Obamacare doesn’t provide subsidies for federally-run insurance exchanges; it’s now the topic of a new case before the Supreme Court. Today, new video surfaced in which Gruber said that “the stupidity of the American voter” made it important for him and Democrats to hide Obamacare’s true costs from the public. “That was really, really critical for the thing to pass,” said Gruber. “But I’d rather have this law than not.” In other words, the ends—imposing Obamacare upon the public—justified the means.

- Washington Free Beacon
“[Gruber] was one of the most senior advisers helping to create the health care law,” Crawford said. “And that’s why people could not believe he said this.”◼ How does Jonathan Gruber feel? - Althouse

But as Mediate reported, Mrs. Pelosi’s website in December 2009 featured a lengthy blog post citing Mr. Gruber’s analysis of Obamacare in an effort to dispel “myths” about the bill. This appears to dispel her first claim.

At the end of the day, liberals not only believe that they’re smarter than the public, but that they have a better sense of what’s good for the people than Americans themselves.

During the legislative debate over Obamacare, Gruber was frequently cited by liberal writers. He was portrayed as the numbers whiz who had all the stats and data to show that it was objectively the right policy. Opponents were portrayed as alternately stupid, dishonest or heartless.

Never mind that the law, among other things, raised rates on young and healthy individuals, forced individuals to purchase insurance, dictated to them what type of insurance they had to have, kicked them out of insurance that they may have liked, and resulted in plans with fewer choices of doctors and hospitals. The smart liberals have had an answer to all of these things.

As they tell it, young and healthy Americans will someday be old and sick; healthy individuals can sometimes suffer unexpected illnesses or accidents; the cheaper insurance they want to buy or want to keep isn’t as good for them as the more expensive insurance they will be forced to buy; and restricting access will contain costs.

It doesn’t stop with Obamacare, of course.

Liberals want to make Americans eat differently and to travel differently. They want taxes to be higher, because they think Americans waste their own money and that experts in government can spend it more wisely. They don’t believe that Americans should have more choice when it comes to saving for their retirement, because they think Americans are too stupid and irresponsible, so they’ll blow it. They don’t think that they should be able to have more choice over where to send their children to school.

Liberals don’t think that state and local governments should resolve most issues, because there are some states they think are dominated by dumb and unsophisticated people. So, to mitigate this, they support giving more power to the federal government, so that the smart people can impose their preferences on the whole country..... READ IT ALL

Oopsie! Another “speak-o”? Hardly. The architect of the nanny-state takeover of the health insurance industry has a pattern of public remarks about his evaluation of the American public as too stupid to take care of itself. That shouldn’t shock anyone; it’s exactly the same attitude that drives all nanny-state policies. Unfortunately for the current administration, Gruber’s dumb enough to air that opinion in public, multiple times, on camera.

This week, President Obama launched a prominent social media campaign on behalf of “net neutrality” and urged the FCC to “keep the Internet free and open.”

The man has gall.

This is the same speech-squelcher in chief whose administration snooped on reporters; vengefully audited tea party pro-life activists and conservative election watchdogs and slow-walked the probe into the IRS witch hunt against them; entertained a government scheme to monitor story selection in TV newsrooms; and forked over $1 million to a researcher building a Twitter-snooping database.

On Monday, House Committee on Science, Space and Technology Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, requested that the National Science Foundation send him all information about how and why the taxpayer-subsidized “Truthy” data-mining project came into existence. Its lead researcher is Filippo Menczer — professor of informatics and computer science and the director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing — who is now on sabbatical at Yahoo! Labs.

Menczer and Indiana University vehemently deny that Truthy is a “political watchdog,” a “government probe of social media,” “an attempt to suppress free speech or limit political speech or develop standards for online political speech,” “a way to define “misinformation,” a partisan political effort, “a system targeting political messages and commentary connected to conservative groups,” “a mechanism to terminate any social media accounts,” or “a database tracking hate speech.”

...Menczer defends against leftwing bias by claiming that “almost all of the most popular hashtags, the most active accounts, and the most tweeted URLs, are from the right. We looked really hard for any ‘truthy’ memes from the left.”''

The South Carolina Republican, in an interview with Fox News' Megyn Kelly on Tuesday, said he "can't even get past the irony to get to the arrogance" of the "most transparent administration since the continents shifted [having] to rely on artifice and deception to pass its signature piece of legislation."

"You can't make that up," Gowdy said. "He had to lie to people, and then he justified it, so I can't even get past the irony of that to even get to the arrogance of him calling our fellow citizens stupid."

...He called you stupid. He admitted that the White House lied to you. Its officials lied to all of us—Republicans, Democrats, and independents; rich and poor; white and brown; men and women.

Liberals should be the angriest. Not only were they personally deceived, but the administration's dishonest approach to health care reform has helped make Obamacare unpopular while undermining the public's faith in an activist government. A double blow to progressives.

On top of that, Gruber has helped make the legal case for anti-Obamacare lawyers. In July, a year-old video surfaced in which Gruber said Washington legally withholds money from states that don't create their own health care exchanges. That could be construed by the Supreme Court to buttress the case against health insurance subsidies....

Dean said was shocked that Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber said “the stupidity of the American voter” was a “political advantage” in passing Obamacare in an interview with MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski on Wednesday.

“The problem is not that he said it–the problem is that he thinks it,” Dean said. “The core problem under the damn law is it was put together by a bunch of elitists who don’t fundamentally understand the American people. That’s what the problem is.”

Kudos to Mika Brzezinski for admitting the truth: if Jonathan Gruber were a Republican, the MSM "would be exploding." Instead, noted Mika on today's Morning Joe, the MSM has been silent on the Gruber story, with only conservative sites [ed.: notably including Newsbusters] covering it.

The greatest repudiation of a President and his Party in living memory continued on Wednesday, as incumbent Democrat Senator Mark Begich’s refusal to concede gracefully came to naught, and a recount confirmed Dan Sullivan’s 8,000-vote victory in Alaska. (As of Wednesday morning, Begich still hadn’t formally conceded.) Senator Sullivan is the eighth Republican pickup in the 2014 wave election; the ninth will most likely arrive in Louisiana in early December.

Very few analysts, including those who were enthusiastic for the Republicans to take the Senate, predicted a +8 or +9 pickup, or the historic gains made in the House and gubernatorial elections.

Not soon after his media-enabled reelection, when President Obama's poll numbers almost immediately began to crater, the media narrative shifted to the steady drumbeat of, "But the approval rating for Congress is much lower." That spin was obviously directed at Republicans, who controlled Congress. Although "congress" can mean both the Democrat-controlled Senate and the House, this was a nifty rhetorical trick the media used to argue that the GOP was in worse shape than Obama.

That lie was not only laid bare in last week's midterm elections, where Republicans at every level of government crushed Democrats (and their media cheerleaders) in a tidal wave that hit blue and purple states, but also in new polling numbers from Gallup that shows GOP lawmakers currently enjoy a higher approval rating from the American people than President Obama....

When asked by Gallup who should have more influence over the direction of the country, a majority of Americans chose Republicans in Congress over Obama by a whopping 56-36% margin.

“But now tonight,” Kelly reported, ” more video has surfaced showing this was not the first time Mr. Gruber called the American people stupid in an ‘off-the-cuff’ remark. In this next clip from also last year, Mr. Gruber explains how Democrats played with the language of the Obamacare law so that it achieved their goals, by again, fooling the stupid public.”

The MIT "genius" purposefully wrote people
could get subsidies ONLY on State exchanges
(blackmailing the States) http://t.co/nivWnK3TgS

Experimental mice have been telling us this for years, but pot-smoking humans didn't want to believe it could happen to them: Compared with a person who never smoked marijuana, someone who uses marijuana regularly has, on average, less gray matter in his orbital frontal cortex, a region that is a key node in the brain's reward, motivation, decision-making and addictive behaviors network.

In an effort to recapture some of the internet magic for President Obama, R. David Edelman, the Senior Advisor for Technology and Economic Policy at the White House tried to promote Obama’s net neutrality statement with a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) post.
Things quickly went sour, however, after members of the community mocked Edelman for being a phony government bureaucrat instead of embracing the free and open style of the community.

President Obama just weighed in on the most controversial issue in internet regulation: whether to put broadband internet service into a different legal category to allow more regulation. Advocates say this change, known as reclassification, is essential if the Federal Communications Commission is to protect network neutrality. But critics say the move could tie the internet up in red tape, slowing investment and innovation.

Rich Weinstein is not a reporter. He does not have a blog. Until this week, the fortysomething's five-year old Twitter account had a follower count in the low double digits.

“I’m an investment advisor,” Weinstein tells me from his home near Philadelphia. “I’m a nobody. I’m the guy who lives in his mom’s basement wearing a tinfoil hat.” (He's joking about the mom and the tinfoil.)

He's also behind a series of scoops that could convince the Supreme Court to dismantle part of the Affordable Care Act. Weinstein has absorbed hours upon hours of interviews with Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who advised the Massachusetts legislature when it created “Romneycare” and the Congress when it created “Obamacare.” Conservatives had been looking for ways to demonstrate that the wording of the ACA denied insurance subsidies to consumers in states that did not create their own health exchanges. Weinstein found a clip of Gruber suggesting that states that did not create health insurance exchanges risked giving up the ACA's subsidies; it went straight into the King v. Burwell brief, and into a case that's currently headed to the Supreme Court.

A few days ago, Weinstein pulled a short clip from Gruber's year-old appearance at a University of Pennsylvania health care conference. As a crowd murmured with laughter, Gruber explained that the process that created the ACA was, by necessity, obfuscated to pull one over on voters.

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” said Gruber. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. Call it the stupidity of the America voter, or whatever.”

You’d think the man who couldn’t launch a website with a billion dollars in funding might be a little more circumspect about trying to seize control of the Internet, but no, there was Barack Obama on Monday, lecturing the supposedly independent FCC on the need to turn cyberspace into a highly-regulated public utility, using an archaic title designed for telecommunications from the rotary-dial era. ◼ The Washington Post reports:

President Obama on Monday called for the government to aggressively regulate Internet service providers such as Verizon and Comcast, treating broadband like a public utility as essential as water, phone service and electricity.

Yes, let’s allow the inept, corrupt government that has given you one titanic faceplant after the other to nationalize Internet access. What could go wrong?

...If your hackles go up at the notion of the Leviathan State ensuring Internet “freedom” through ham-fisted regulation, good: you’re thinking straight....

There are reasonable cases to be made for government regulation, and of course the industry isn’t exactly unregulated now. But using archaic laws to set up a massive new regulatory regime is just too much. It might begin with four proposals that sound good to many ears, but it surely will not end there. I counsel skepticism towards the regulators at least as deep as the cynicism we feel toward their targets. No matter what objections we might raise to their business practices, those companies will always easier to bring to heel than Big Government is.

Retired SEAL Team commander Chuck Pfarrer, author of SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama bin Laden, told Guns & Patriots that the Obama White House manufactured their own narrative of the SEAL raid that killed bin Laden for the purpose of a quid pro quo with Hollywood.

The 2012 action thriller “Zero Dark Thirty” allegedly tells the story about the May 1, 2011 SEAL raid code-named “Neptune’s Spear” on bin Laden who was hiding in Abottabad, Pakistan, is fictitious, said the former SEAL commander, who spoke to members of the SEAL Team Six, and other principals involved while gathering information on his book. “Look at the movie – it’s preposterous.”

The Rotary Club of Southwest Eureka will present its annual Veterans Day program to honor veterans of all branches of the United States armed forces on November 11 at 11AM at the Adorni Center in Eureka, 1011 Waterfront Drive. The program will feature decorated USAF pilot Colonel Chuck DeBellevue; Eureka High School Jazz Ensemble; Eureka High School Limited Edition; members of the NSDAR who will provide refreshments after the program; Humboldt Harmonaires; and representatives of the NJROTC who will provide the color guard.

Monday, November 10, 2014

The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association helped stop the majority party from gaining a supermajority in the Legislature. If they had a supermajority, they could put a Prop. 13 repeal on the ballot, but since taxpayers stopped them, Prop. 13 is safe for the time being.

...But for now, let’s enjoy the victories just achieved. Just in time for the coming holiday, taxpayers and homeowners in California have much to be thankful for. And while we realize our reprieve will be short and that we must prepare for battle anew in a few short weeks, these victories give us the much needed hope that California can, once again, become the Golden State it once was.

The blue blocks are counties with male majorities, and the red are those with female majorities. It cycles through based on age groups; so it starts from 0-19 and moves through time to 20-44, and so on.

He suggested the sinking fortunes of the Democrats “have been pretty accurately charted in the declining ratings at MSNBC,” which unsurprisingly fell 22 percent from their 2010 midterm ratings in the important demographic of 25-to-54. (It couldn’t have helped for Joy Reid to announce in the afternoon that she couldn’t imagine what the good news would be.) This is the main thought:

MSNBC's problem is almost exactly the same as the Democrats' problem: It built its future around a vivid and dramatic hero who, unfortunately, turned out to be both opaque and conflict averse. MSNBC now has a lineup of ever-righteous and often sulky defenders of President Barack Obama, who seem, not just to conservatives but to many liberals, too, bizarrely tone deaf and lost in time.

...During the 2012 presidential debate, Mitt Romney had said it took Obama 14 days to admit the attack was terrorism but Obama bulked saying he did that day, but when asked the next day he is seen refusing to give a terror motive saying, "Well, it's too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved. but, obviously, it was an attack on Americans."

Attkisson said, "Let me say that that exchange should have been pulled out immediately after the debate, which would have been very newsy at the time. It was exclusive to CBS. It would have to me proven Romney's point against Obama. But that clip was kept secret."

"I was covering Benghazi, nobody told me we had it and directed me from the 'Evening News' to a different clip of the same interview to give the impression that the president had done the opposite. And it was only right before the election that somebody kind of leaked out the transcript to others of us as CBS and we were really shocked. We saw that was something very unethical done to have kept that up."

She added, "The 'Evening News' people who had access to that transcript, according to the emails that I saw when it was sent from '60 Minutes' to 'Evening News' the very day it was taken, they, in my view, skipped over it, passed it up, kept it secret. And I think that was because they were trying to defend the president and they thought that would be harmful to him."

For a generation, Democrats stood up against Republican presidents who they deemed to be too eager to go to war—or too ready to put troops in harm’s way without the full consent of the American people through their elected representatives in Congress.

Where have those Democratic protectors of the constitutional authority of Congress gone? Was it always just a partisan attack on Republican presidents?

If not, when will Democrats—who so vociferously opposed a Republican president’s extraconstitutional war-making powers—stand up and oppose President Obama’s unconstitutional usurpation of war-making powers?

...the War Powers Act reiterates the legislature’s prerogative. The War Powers Act does not allow for any military action to take place that is not authorized by Congress or to repel imminent attack. Period. The only exception is military action to repel an imminent attack. In that case, the president has 60 days to report to Congress. Obviously, it’s an exception that doesn’t apply to any of our current wars.

This administration has allowed, as Professor Michael J. Glennon writes, “nothing less than a collapse of the equilibrium of power, the balance expected to result from ambition set against ambition, the resistance to encroachment that was supposed to keep the three branches of the federal government in a state of equilibrium and to protect the people from the government.”

It’s time for conservatives to say enough is enough. Obama’s commandeering of Congress’s powers—from making war, to remaking our health-care system—has to stop. There needs to be an across-the-board, consistent defense of the constitutional separation of powers. Nothing less will win the day. That should include this current battle in the Middle East. Taking military action against ISIS is justified. The president acting without Congress is not. KEEP READING

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“Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” .....Robert A. Heinlein quotes (American science-fiction Writer, 1907-1988)